The Hunger Games: Dominion
by Paracosmist
Summary: Twenty years after the events of Mockingjay, the United States of Panem is undergoing its sixth national election. Standing for the Mockingjay Party who have ruled for twenty years, Gale Hawthorne's route to the presidency looks like a dead cert. That is until the upstart Capitol Party start grabbing national attention, headed by none other than media darling, Celestia Snow...


I start the day like I always do, feeding and washing Effie and Haymitch and making sure they've taken the meds my mother sends from the Capitol. Effie loves me tending to her and submits to my touch like a baby bird. Haymitch is the opposite. It took half the District to extract him from his mansion to mine and Peeta's, and even then he'd snarled and cursed and writhed like an animal, furious at the betrayal of everyone he knew. He only barely accepts the indignity of being cared for even now.

My sympathy for him is minimal. Unlike Effie, all of his miseries are of his own making. He decided to quit one day, cold turkey, despite everyone's advice to take it slowly. The shakes got so bad we had to tend to him in shifts, and spoon feed him water because he couldn't hold anything in his hands. He's better now, and the shakes are barely a tremor, but he's a shadow of the man he was.

Given the man he was, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. He still gives me a hard time, pinching my arm when I try to force him to swallow down the meds and refusing to eat sometimes when he's feeling low. There's something oddly comforting about the whole ritual of abuse. The day Haymitch submits to me is the day the Haymitch I knew is officially dead and gone.

After I've set up Effie and Haymitch in the living room with a remote control (for Effie, who insisted I finally bought a television) and a pipe (need you ask), I feed the cats. All nine of them. Thresh, Foxface, Finnick, Castor, Boggs, Wiress, Madge and Buttercup the Third all swarm over each other, snapping for first dibs in what looks disturbingly like a feline Cornucopia. I make a beeline for my favourite, the runt of Foxface's most recent litter, making sure she gets a decent meal.

Little Rue is the sweetest kitten I've ever raised. I sold her brothers and sisters at the Hob, but only under duress. Even I could see the cat situation was becoming ridiculous, and when Peeta said we were spending more on the cats than the kids it was only slightly hyperbolic. I'd never intended on keeping Buttercup. She'd just hung around until I got used to her, and when she got knocked up at a grand old age I didn't have the heart to give her babies away, especially when she died soon afterwards. The kids at the school where I teach call me Katniss the Cat Lady now. If only Prim could see what I've become.

I feed myself last, usually rustling up some oats with milk and honey, an unthinkable luxury back in the bad old days that I still gobble down like it's about to be taken from me. Then I'm off to work at the school. Technically I don't need to be there until the afternoon when I teach gym and run the after school clubs in survival skills and archery, but I like to make myself busy and help out in Bristel's classes.

The Victor's Village is as silent and barren as it always was and I move through it quickly, almost holding my breath until I'm out in the District proper. Twelve slowly built itself back up after the war, and it's a pleasure to see cafes and stores bustling with familiar faces, smoking tobacco and drinking bad coffee and reminiscing about the old times. It's almost enough to mask the boarded up windows and fading storefronts which seem to multiply every year. Practically the entire Merchant class has moved on now, so all of those old faces are Seam like me, mining families who took over the stores and businesses when the Merchants moved to wherever business was booming that year. These are the Twelve loyalists, the lifers who have no interest in doing what has become a rite of passage for the teenagers we raise here: moving to the Capitol the minute they turn eighteen.

At the end of the old Merchant Row I'm forced to walk across what became Katniss Square after the war. I'm almost used to being confronted by the statue of me smack bang in the middle, right where you can't miss it. Every District got the same one in the wake of the revolution, fourteen Girls on Fire wrought in stone and planted in fourteen Katniss Squares. Technically we're not even called District 12 anymore. All the Districts got renamed after the war, so we're now the great state of Appalachia, in honour of an ancient name we supposedly used to have. Everyone over the age of thirty still calls it District 12. It's one of the many things that marks us out from the younger ones, that different species who have no memory of the dark times.

Gale came down with some other higher-ups in the Mockingjay Party to unveil the statue and open the square to the public. This was a nonsense given that it had existed for decades and had only been renamed, but the party wanted to squeeze all the good publicity from me they could get. I had to cut a ribbon from around my stone waist, as if I was a store being opened for exchange. Gale had an eerily fixed grin plastered across his face throughout. As the ceremony droned on I caught him looking at me strangely, as if he was confused as to why I wasn't gushing with joy at such an honor. How could someone who had known me so well forget who I was so quickly?

I didn't want any of this fuss. I found the whole thing cringeworthy. They'd given me a tiny waist and giant breasts and framed the whole sham in stone flames that were admittedly beautifully rendered. The statue is a great source of fun to the kids in my classes, who love to joke about how crotchety old Mrs Everdeen used to be a superstar and whisper "Look out for the Granny on Fire!" as I walk down corridors, sparking lighters I haven't yet confiscated in my wake.

I don't know what it is about the statue that makes me notice it more than usual today, but I realise with a jolt of surprise that I am looking at an image of my daughter. The body was always a fantasy I suppose I _should_ havethanked Gale for, but the face was a good likeness once upon a time. I barely recognise myself in it now. I've never been one to care much for my appearance and I've spent more time outdoors in the past twenty years than is probably good for the skin. I feel much older than thirty-eight, and I suspect I look it too, if Greasy Sae's insistence on peddling me homebrewed night creams every time I visit the Hob is anything to go by. I haven't really looked at the statue for a long time, and it's as if a mischief maker has replaced it with one of Primrose, just to see my reaction.

The reminder of my daughter is a bitter one. Primrose and I haven't spoken in days, still thick in the aftermath of one of our ferocious arguments. I've never been able to argue so intensely with someone over so little. Everything about her infuriates me. Her laziness, her vanity, her arrogance. The feeling is more than mutual.

"Just you wait!" she'd screamed at the height of the most recent battle, as Peeta cowered impotently in the corner. "Just you wait 'til I turn eighteen and I move to the Capitol and you'll never see me again!"

"Good!" I'd shouted in return, regretting it even as it left my lips. "Go and dye your hair and your skin and prance around with the rest of that useless bunch. You'll fit right in, I'm sure!"

That was the last thing I'd said to my daughter, and I felt so ashamed of it that I still didn't know how to make it right. For years we'd walked to the school together, me and her brother and her father, pointing out plants and animals and talking excitedly about the day ahead. Now Peeta leaves at the crack of dawn to start running the bakery and Cinna helps him out before his classes. He's a big, strong boy with his father's shoulders, one I can barely reconcile with the sweet boy who used to fuss around me and wouldn't play with the others kids.

Primrose was the bold one, the one who easily dominated a crowd and was always in the thick of the action. Now she usually lazes around until five minutes before she has to be at school, still applying mascara and fussing her hair as Bristel takes attendance. The day I realised she was avoiding having to walk with me was one of the sadder days of my motherhood. I suppose all teenagers become ashamed of their parents, but it still hurts.

The kids at the school are as breezy as ever, and it's a relief to be around all that fizzing energy. They buzzed with rumors that Bristel was going to announce a school trip and tried to plug me for information, but this was the first I'd heard of anything. Bristel is the oldest friend I have left now, unless you count Peeta and Sae, who may well be immortal. She does a fantastic job of teaching the District kids in English and Arithmetic and Science and History, complicated subjects I've never had much of a mind for.

There's barely any children left in the District now, so they've all been squeezed into one class. The youngest is eleven and the oldest are my own kids, fifteen and sixteen. The baby boom after the war has long passed, and most of the younger families have moved on, hankering for pieces of the action in Three and Four, or Cipangu and Nahua as I should say. It's understandable of course. There's not much to speak of in Twelve now. The mines were shut down a few years after the revolution, not fit for purpose after years of neglect. The best workers were moved to the new ones in Eight and Nine, modernised and closer to the Capitol.

I never will get used to the silly new names all the Districts got after the war. I'm only starting to remember them now because we have to police the playground for any sign of the skipping rhyme that's become the latest craze. The first time I heard it, I thought it was a cute way of learning all the new names, a necessary task for the kids in a District in which barely any of the adults use the proper state terminology. It wasn't until the final part of the rhyme that I realised what I was hearing, and tore through the playground like a cyclone.

 _Metallon and Mogollon,_

 _Villam and Shoshone,_

 _Thirteen states in unison, and the Queen rules them all!_

 _Let's climb a tree in Kanata,_

 _And splash our toes in Nahua,_

 _Catch death in Appalachia, the Queen rules over all!_

 _Shoshone gives us winter cloaks_

 _There's fruit up in Dominion's oaks_

 _Sacto will fill us full of dope, and let Queen rule us all!_

 _Helianthus really stinks_

 _And Cipangu is full of chinks_

 _Soon Queen won't be able to think, and barely rule at all!_

 _Last but not least is Deroche,_

 _Where Queen will get the old kibosh,_

 _We can't say it will be a loss, when Queen rules not at all!_

 _But then we forgot Dirigo,_

 _Where things are just about to blow,_

 _Goodbye old Queenie, off you go, and leave the rule to all!_

The racist slang was bad enough coming from the mouths of kids who certainly hadn't learned that sort of word from their parents, but the blatant threat to the Capitol, rechristened Queen City after the riots, was outright dangerous. The Mockingjay Party might have ruled for twenty years with delicacy and restraint in comparison to what came before them, but I dreaded to think what would happen if a Party official happened to be in Twelve and heard what was coming from the mouths of our children. We might still be a backwater, but sedition is still illegal in the United States of Panem, and the punishment is still death. I ripped the skipping rope from poor Maysilee's hands before she even knew what was happening. I still haven't been able to work out where she learned it from. I can't imagine one of our kids could come up with something as clever and twisted as that.

I usher the kids into Bristel's classroom and make a space for myself at the back in case I'm needed. Bristel is Seam like me, a brown skinned woman with long black hair who could easily pass for my cousin. She's one of those old timers who was lucky enough to have escaped the District when Gale evacuated it and who came back when the war ended, but I can't say I even remember seeing her once in Thirteen. Funny how life decides who'll end up being important to you. Now she's probably the closest thing I have to a friend. Odd, the way she was avoiding my gaze. I should've known something was wrong.

"Okay class, simmer down" said Bristel, frowning as Primrose burst in with customary lateness and threw herself down at the nearest available desk. "I know a lot of you are excited about the rumors that have somehow been leaking all around here this morning, and I'm happy to tell you it's true. We'll be making our first field trip for three years, and it's going to be the best one yet!"

"Are we going to Nahua?" said Primrose, for once engaged in what her teacher was saying. "I'll die if I don't see the ocean soon, I'll actually _die_."

"Sorry to hear that Prim, and glad you could join us." I wince at Bristel's abbreviation. Primrose is never Prim to me, will never be Prim. "I'm afraid it's not the Sunshine State we'll be visiting this summer."

The class groan in unison. The last trip we made, after a year of scrimping and begging our Mockingjay representative for state funding, was to Mogollon, what was once District 5. We visited the labs where the Capitol bred muttations and conducted a wealth of abhorrent experiments, and saw all the science behind the big successes of the new United States of Panem. It was grimly fascinating but not exactly teen friendly, and by the third day we'd lost them almost completely. Poor Bristel wept all the way home on the train. I was surprised she was putting herself through this again, and even more surprised that she'd hidden the fundraising from me, knowing how time consuming it must have been.

"No, it's just a little place known as…Queen City!"

Anyone walking past the school building at that moment would have been forgiven for assuming there had been some sort of explosion. The class erupted in cheering, shrieking, crying, laughing. Queen City! The greatest city on earth, and they would be there! Now I knew why Bristel had kept this from me. My eyes bore into hers, until she couldn't evade my gaze any longer. She could barely look me in the eye. She knew how much I would hate this, how angry it would make me.

She was going to take our kids to the Capitol.


End file.
